Incidental Relaunch - Spring '24 in Review, Fall '24 Launch

Introduction

We are thrilled to begin the official relaunch of the Northwestern University Press blog, your new home for all things new with NUP. In case you’re new here, let us introduce ourselves! We are Northwestern University Press, and we are dedicated to publishing works of enduring scholarly and cultural value, extending the university’s mission to a community of readers throughout the world. We’ll be using this blog weekly to bring you news of upcoming releases, interviews, topical pieces from our upcoming authors, and more! Our goal is to give you insider looks into anything from writing processes to our staff to the publishing world, and we hope you’ll stay with us to learn.

Spring 2024 Season in Review

This being the launch of our new blog, we thought it apt to look back at what’s been going on this past season. In the spring and summer of 2024, NUP published many new trade and scholarly works, spanning from Florida to Silicon Valley. We saw these books gain some spectacular coverage in media outlets, as well as see our authors put together some amazing book tours. Additionally, our books from seasons past garnered some much-deserved award recognition in both the scholarly and trade realms. This inaugural post is to serve as both an opportunity to look back on the previous season, and to launch into the one commencing now. We’ve curated a round-up of publicity, awards, and more to celebrate all that our Spring/Summer authors achieved this year.

Spring ’24 Publicity

NUP’s incredible publicist, Charlotte Keathley, is hard at work getting the word out about all of our titles, and if we were to list every fruit of that labor for Spring 2024, we’d be here all day! As these roundups are published each month, we will highlight more of our publicity wins, but for the sake of brevity in our inaugural post, here are four titles we are very proud of:

Archive of Style, retrospective poetry collection of Black lesbian icon Cheryl Clarke, has been highlighted and featured in a number of publications including The Advocate, Xtra, POETRY Magazine, BUST Magazine, New York Amsterdam News, Foreword, the New York Times, and CBS Sunday Morning

The Curators, Maggie Nye’s surrealist coming-of-age historical novel, has been featured in Kirkus, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Georgia Public Broadcasting, the Chicago Review of Books, the Southern Review of Books, Lit Hub, Electric Lit, Deep South Magazine, Five South, Marietta Daily Journal, Arts ATL, Rough Draft Atlanta, and Reactor Magazine

The Backwards Hand, Matt Lee’s genre-bending memoir of disability and monstrosity, has been featured in Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, Fangoria, Polygon, Dread Central, Full Stop Magazine, Wake Island Podcast, and the Frederick News-Post

The Day’s Hard Edge, a collection of queer Chicano poetry by Jose Antonio Rodriguez, has been featured in The New Yorker, Lit Hub, the Bay Area Reporter, and Texas Public Radio

Awards 2023-2024

A great many Northwestern University Press authors and titles have been honored with awards in the past year, including:

Trade:

The Archivists, Daphne Kalotay
- Longlisted for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize
- Longlisted for the Massachusetts Book Award

The Perfect Bastard, Quinn Carver Johnson
- LAMBDA in LGBTQ+ Poetry

Patricia Smith
- 2023 Aiken Taylor Award

Manuel Muñoz
- 2023 MacArthur Fellowship

Nikky Finney
- POETRY Magazine Editors Prize for Feature Article

Megan Stielstra
- Best of Chicago 2023 Nominee (Nonfiction Author)
- StoryStudio 2024 Instructor of the Year Award

David Mura
- 2024 Guggenheim Fellow

Vievee Francis
- 2024 Guggenheim Fellow

Scholarly:

Colorblind Tools, Marzia Milazzo
- AES Outstanding Book Award 2023

The Idea of Indian Literature, Preetha Mani
- MLA Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for South Asian Studies

Feelin’, Bettina Judd
- Honorable Mention of the MLA William Sanders Scarborough Prize

The Aesthetic Life of Infrastructure, Nicole M. Rizzuto, Kelly M. Rich, and Susan Zieger
- MLA Prize for an Edited Collection

Cannibal Translation, Isabel C. Gómez
- 2024 ACLA Harry Levin Prize

Horizon, Sea, Sound, Andrea A. Davis
- Canadian Association of Latin American and Carribean Studies’ Best Book Prize

Traces of the Unseen, Carolina Sá Carvalho
- 2024 Roberto Reis Book Award
- LASA Environment Section Best Book of 2023

Restaging the Future, Louise Owen
- Shortlisted for TaPRA’s David Bradbury Monograph Prize
- Shortlisted for ATHE’s Best Book Award

Theatricality of the Closet, Michelle Liu Carriger
- Shortlisted for ATHE’s Best Book Award

Fall 2024 Season Launch

September kicks off the Fall Season here at NUP, and we are so excited to get these books out into the world. From poetry collections interrogating family, masculinity, and what it means to be a human in the digital age to essays and story collections about the breadth of the human experience to scholarly projects on topics from burial rites to comets, we’ve got something for readers of all stripes.

Our theme for the season, inspired by our beautiful catalog cover is Astrological Reading. Each month, we’ll sign off our wrap up blog post with a reading list dedicated to the month’s sign.

Books for Virgo Season

September is, of course, dedicated to Virgo. Born between August 23 and September 22, Virgos are the perfectionists of the Zodiac. They are diligent problem-solvers who can sometimes fall into traps of overthinking and self-doubt. They are supportive and helpful, but that help can sometimes come off as critical. Down-to-earth, reliable, hardworking, and honest, it’s no wonder that Virgos are often powerhouses (looking at you, Beyonce).

Happy Birthday, Virgos!